Since a driver of an automobile has a narrow view at night, a risk of traffic accident occurrence is high and, when a traffic accident occurs, a death rate is high. Therefore, the development of a light distribution control system is underway. The light distribution control system divides an irradiation range of headlights of an own vehicle into a plurality of small regions and adjusts the intensity and the height of beams in the respective regions to thereby prevent drivers of other vehicles from being dazzled while increasing visibility for the driver at night. As a method of detecting a preceding vehicle and an oncoming vehicle at night, for example, there is a method of extracting, using, for example, a vehicle-mounted camera, headlights of the oncoming vehicle and taillights of the preceding vehicle out of points of white light and points of red light reflected in an image.
However, light sources such as streetlights and reflected lights of reflectors are present on a road besides lights of other vehicles. All the light sources are reflected in a camera image as points of light. Therefore, it is necessary to identify light sources of the other vehicles and light sources other than the light sources of the other vehicles out of the light sources. In particular, the reflected lights of the reflectors present on the road tend to be misrecognized as headlights of oncoming vehicles.
In order to prevent the reflected lights of the reflectors from being misrecognized as headlights of oncoming vehicles, for example, PTL 1 describes a method of recognizing a white line and determining that light on the recognized white line is not a headlight of an oncoming vehicle.
PTL 2 describes a method of changing a signal processing range of a radar according to road information acquired from a navigation system.